Halfway through reading Harmony, I began to suspect I might be going mad. When I mentioned this to my wife, she looked at me in a not-entirely-surprised sort of way and said: 'What makes you think that?’

'Well,’ I told her, 'I’m reading this book by Prince Charles and I find myself agreeing with quite a lot of it.’

Charles thinks that we have become progressively divorced from Nature and in doing so have lost something fundamental in ourselves.

As a result, we now live in an Age of Disconnection, cut off from the rhythms and the bounty of the world. The advantages this has brought us in material terms are, he reckons, dwarfed by the homogeneity, spiritual impoverishment and blinkered thinking that have come with it.